The Colonial Settler Narrative

“Never ceded. Always was, still is, and always will be, our land.”

The refrain above can be heard often in my country, Australia, when a public event starts with a ‘welcome to country’ from Aboriginal elders. ‘Welcome to our country’, they will say, ‘to this land – never ceded, which always was, still is, and always will be our land, the land that nurture us, the land of which we are and always will be a part”.

The lands where I live and work were originally the lands of the Dharug, the Wiradjuri, and the Ngunnawal. I support their elders reminding non-Aboriginal Australians at public events of the dispossession of their peoples over the past two and a half centuries. I accept that they continue to have a connection to their land and that our work of reconciliation and restoration of rights is not complete.

I think their claims to indigeneity and their special connection to their lands would hold true even if it were 2124 or 2224, and they were still a small minority telling the story of their dispossession, of their yearning for return, and seeking some settlement that recognised their claims and allowed, somehow, for them to re-establish rights over and stewardship of their lands.

How is this relevant in a Times of Israel blog?

Nasser Mashni, the head of the Australian Palestinian Advocacy Network, was reported recently as stating that Australian Aboriginals face the same enemy as the Palestinians – colonialism – and that both Israel and Australia are Western colonial constructs.

Israel as a creation of ‘20^th century settler colonialism’ is, I’m afraid, a trope gaining ground in Australia by repetition in, and tolerance by, the media.

It’s likely unnecessary for most readers of a Times of Israel blog, but let me take the time to correct, at least for Australians, that framing of the establishment of modern Israel.

The colonial settler narrative starts by emphasising that at the turn of the 19^th century, the Jewish community in Palestine was in the minority. It then focuses narrowly on the movement of Jews from Europe into Palestine in the middle of the 20^th century and portrays this as foreign settlement imposed on indigenous Palestinian Arab communities by Britain.

This narrative relies completely on ignorance of the longer history of the Jews, Israel, and Palestine, and on an ideological rendition of 20th century history.

The Jewish community was once in the majority in the lands that became designated as Palestine by Imperial Rome. Rome first destroyed Jewish resistance to its rule, then deconstructed Jewish society, and then exiled Jews into other parts of its empire.

The Jewish people could arguably be seen as the people who have suffered the greatest and longest punishment in history for resisting colonial powers. First the Roman, then the Christian Byzantine, then numerous Muslim imperial powers kept exiled Jews, generation after generation, from returning to join remnant communities in Palestine.

The Arab identity of these lands in the settler colonial narrative was itself the product of two periods of imperial rule and colonisation. Byzantine rulers supported large scale Christian Arab migration and settlement into these lands – ‘Arabisation’ as it is described briefly in Masalha’s book Palestine: A Four Thousand Year History – in the 5^th and 6^th centuries CE. They crushed local opposition to the process, not least in Samaritan revolts that saw that indigenous population decimated.

Islam was introduced and spread across these lands by military force and imperial promotion in the 7^th and following centuries. And in that one fact alone is the unfortunate reality for the settler colonial narrative: Judaism has a much stronger claim to indigeneity in Palestine than Islam, notwithstanding the latter’s appropriation of Jerusalem as one of its major holy sites.

Remnant Jewish communities continued in Palestine throughout various imperial eras. They and exiled Jews never ceded the land they knew as Israel, never gave up their identity, and never gave up hope of returning and rebuilding. As the Ottoman empire began to crumble at the start of the 20^th century, diaspora Jews returned to join remnant Jewish communities in Palestine and build new ones.

Land was negotiated and purchased from local Palestinians. Jewish communities, and indeed cities, began to flourish. Jews fleeing pogroms and genocidal violence – not just from Europe but from across the Middle East – sought refuge in them.

Through the first half of the 20^th century and as WWII came to an end, Jewish leaders sought to negotiate a political arrangement that could see their people, as the Christian theologian Reinhold Neibuhr observed, live their lives as Jews without a ‘by your leave’. Their vision, indeed, their offer, was for a new, small, secular and democratic Israel alongside newly independent Arab states and a new Palestinian state, with a shared Jerusalem.

The tragedy of modern history in the Middle East is that Arab leaders opposed any political arrangement that shared these lands and that created a state for the Jews. They chose war to reverse the creation of Israel by the international community. Palestinians have suffered from that choice, a recurring choice as Hamas’s current war against Israel has shown, ever since.

As this brief re-telling of the millennia-long history of the Jews and the re-creation of Israel reveals, the narrative of European settler colonialism is an anti-Israel ideological narrative, not an historical account.

In the struggle for recognition of centuries-long oppression and of resilient indigenous identity and hope, the obvious parallel for ‘first nations’ Australians is in fact, and contrary to Mr Mashni’s claim, with the ‘first nation’ of Israel, the Jews.

Indeed, there is in the ‘never ceded … always will be’ refrain, an echo of another disempowered people’s refrain: ‘by the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion’.